Cities with an even distribution of facilities, housing and green space were linked with lower levels of inequality between residents’ life satisfaction levels, suggesting that more equal access to a range of facilities and types of land may help reduce the gap in life satisfaction between the most economically-deprived and most affluent residents of a city.

There was a strong link between higher life satisfaction and living in cities with homes surrounded by natural, green space. However, lower life satisfaction was linked to living in cities that had more wasteland, more space dedicated to housing, and more space in which all the land is concrete or tarmacked.

Implications for policy and planning.

The findings of our study suggest that urban planning has a role to play in addressing inequalities in cities. Our finding that more equal distribution of land cover/use is associated with lower levels of socio-economic inequality in life satisfaction supports the idea that city environments could be equigenic – that is, could create equality.

Why understanding city design is important for population health and well-being?

With the United Nations reporting that more than half the world’s population residing in urban areas and this proportion rising, it is important to understand how well-planned urban environment might improve, and reduce inequalities in, quality of life. Therefore, understanding the influence urban environments can have on all aspects of health and wellbeing is increasingly important. Cities are continuously evolving and there is ample opportunity to ensure these are healthier and happier place to live.

What we did:

We applied theory and methods from landscape ecology to explore associations between cities’ land cover/use, residents’ reported life satisfaction and within-city socio-economic inequalities in life satisfaction. We joined individual-level responses to the European Urban Audit (EUA) Perception Surveys (2012 and 2015) with city-level data from the European Urban Atlas classifying land cover/use into 26 different classes. Our sample included 63,554 people from 66 cities in 28 countries.

The study, ‘Are urban landscapes associated with reported life satisfaction and inequalities in life satisfaction at the city level? A cross-sectional study of 66 European Cities’ is published in Social Science & Medicine (Open Access). The work was funded by The Medical Research Council (MRC) and Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office.

The connection between the local availability of tobacco products and smoking behaviour has been underlined in new research from the CRESH team this week. Published in the journal Tobacco Control, we show how moving into an area of Scotland where tobacco products are more readily available can significantly increase the risk of smoking while pregnant. We estimate that a pregnant woman living in an area with the highest tobacco availability is 70% more likely to smoke than when she was living in an area with the lowest availability of tobacco products.

Why is this important? Firstly, smoking during pregnancy is a vital Public Health issue and is recognised as a key priority area for UK health policy. It is harmful for both the mother and the developing fetus and the effects for social and health outcomes can persist into childhood and adulthood. Since smoking is so strongly associated with poverty and deprivation, it also has an important role to play in the persistence of health inequalities across generations.

But there are other reasons why the research is important. Much of what we know, including previous research from CRESH, is based on information from a single point in time. While these studies are crucial in establishing the strength of associations, they are less useful for determining mechanisms. A key question that remains is whether high availability is the cause of smoking behaviour or whether retailers preferentially locate in areas of high demand. Both pathways are plausible but both carry very different conclusions and policy recommendations. Our latest research is able to address this question using information on smoking during pregnancy which is collected routinely as part of Scotland’s hospital maternity records. By looking at multiple pregnancies to the same individual, we were able to relate changes in smoking behaviour between pregnancies to changes in exposure to tobacco retailers from residential moves. This approach provides strong evidence that availability is causally linked to behaviour.

The policy implications are clear. As more and more countries move towards a “Tobacco Endgame” policy this, and other research, highlights how a focus on tackling the local availability of tobacco products will be crucial. In a week where the UK government has suggested that preventing poor health lies with “people choosing to look after themselves better, staying active and stopping smoking” our findings are a timely reminder of the importance of considering the wider set of structural factors that shape our health of which our residential environment is one important component.

This blog explores a key question in neighbourhood and health research: if there is a facility or amenity close to someone’s home, is it OK to assume they use it? Surprisingly, this assumption is at the heart of a lot of health and environment research.

We often have data which tells us where facilities and amenities are, and we tend to make the assumption that proximity means use. So, for example, if we see that some neighbourhoods have more parks or more leisure facilities, we expect the people who live in that neighbourhood use them more. Understanding local amenity and facility use is important because we want to know whether / how these things affect health.

With technological advances in recent years, studies have started to collect precise data which tell us exactly where people go using global position system (GPS) devices. We no longer have to assume, for example, that if there’s a park close to a child’s home, they will visit it. The GPS tracks we collect will tell us if they did or not. That presents an opportunity to test our assumptions.

Do children use facilities they have access to in their home neighbourhood?

Our team is interested in children’s use of facilities in and around their homes and to test whether we need GPS to research this we conducted an analysis of facility availability and facility use for 30 10-year-old children living in Glasgow. We used data from GPS devices worn by the children for eight days. These children were part of our ‘Studying Physical Activity in Children’s Environments across Scotland’ Study (SPACES).

The diagram below shows what we did. Our key finding was that facility availability in the home neighbourhood is not a good indicator of facility use; the children used facilities from across a much wider area in the city, even if they had a facility close to their home. For example, 18 of the 30 children (60%) had a leisure centre within their ‘neighbourhood’ (which we defined as 800m around their home). Only 3 of the 18 actually visited that facility (as identified by their GPS tracks). Of those 18 children, 8 actually visited a leisure centre outside of their ‘neighbourhood’. We saw the same kind of pattern when exploring availability and visits to playing fields, public parks and libraries

Are our results similar to other research?

Yes, other studies that used GPS devices have found that children do spend time outside of their immediate home area for specific purposes. For example, a 2017 study by Chambers and colleagues in Wellington, New Zealand analysed leisure time GPS data (before and after school) in 114 children aged 11 to 13 years from 16 schools, and found that 38% of their leisure time was spent outside of the home neighbourhood (using a 750m buffer around the home). Time outside of the home neighbourhood was mostly spent visiting their school, other residential locations, and fast food outlets.

These results, and those from similar studies, show that it is important not to treat what’s in someone’s immediate home neighbourhood as a good measure of what they do, or in epidemiological language ‘what they are exposed to’. We must challenge the idea that residential neighbourhood is an adequate way to capture the socio-environmental factors which contribute to health. Many people, including children, can and do access environments well beyond their immediate home neighbourhood. We think that a much wider geographic area should be considered when we’re asking questions about how environment affects health and we call this the city-wide landscape.

What does this mean for future research?

It’s clear that the ‘traditional’ approach which uses someone’s neighbourhood (often defined by a distance around their home, or an administrative area in which their home sits) to assess their access to facilities or exposure to environments is seriously flawed.

Other methodological approaches are required to measure ‘exposure’ to environment;

How important for mental health are the changing social, economic and environmental conditions in the places where we live? Our research, funded by ESRC, addresses this question through a new and innovative study of mental health of people living in different parts of Scotland. We are focussing especially on the period since 2007 when economic recession and austerity have impacted to a varying extent across the country. This event will use interactive data visualisations to present our research findings, showing how audience polling techniques allow the participants to select topics of special interest for them, to help determine in ‘real time’ the focus of the results presented. This will be combined with an opportunity for group discussion and exchange of ideas among diverse participants, many of whom will be involved in mental health care and promotion of better mental health. We will be sharing new evidence and discussing the implications for policy and practice in different parts of Scotland. The event is also intended to help shape the future research agenda.

We had a really productive day on the 7th of November, thanks to the helpful and encouraging input from all the attendees. Please feel free to download and share the Powerpoint slides. We have collated the information gathered using Mentimeter and transcribed the written notes. The report which features a discussion on how these findings relate to the wider project is now available to download.

CRESH’s Rich Mitchell is part of the GCRF Funded Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC) at the University of Glasgow. The centre is offering 3 new PhD studentships which include a focus on neighbourhood and city effects on health. More details and how to apply can be found below and via the University’s Website: http://bit.ly/SHLCPhD

Closing Date: 17 June 2018

Research Topic

Candidates are required to provide an outline proposal of no more than 1000 words. We are particularly interested in proposals that encompass any of the following topics:

a) The development and operationalisation of indicators/classification/measures of spatial differentiation (including its temporal evolution) of neighbourhoods within SHLC case study cities, and the implications of spatial differentiation for access to public services;

b) The development and operationalisation of indicators/classification/measures for lifelong learning in cities and neighbourhoods in the global south, including links to a range of life wide literacies;

d) Investigations of the impact of informality on social sustainability in neighbourhoods within SHLC case study cities, paying particular attention to the interaction between urban, health and education challenges

The award
Both Home/EU and International applicants are eligible to apply. The scholarship is open to +3 (3 years PhD only) commencing in October 2018 and will provide: a stipend at the ESRC rate, 100% tuition fee waiver, and access to the Research Training Support Grant.
How to Apply

All applicants should complete and collate the following documentation then attach to a single email and send to socsci-scholarships@glasgow.ac.uk with the subject line ‘GCRF SHLC Scholarship application‘ by 17 June 2018

Academic Transcript(s) and Degree Certificate(s)

Final or current degree transcripts including grades and degree certificates (and official translations, if needed) – scanned copy in colour of the original documents.

References

2 references on headed paper (academic and/or professional).

At least one reference must be academic, the other can be academic or professional. Your references should be on official headed paper. These should also be signed by the referee.

If your referees would prefer to provide confidential references direct to the University then we can also accept the reference by email, from the referee’s official university or business email account to socsci-scholarships@glasgow.ac.uk clearly labelling the reference e.g. “<applicant name> CoSS Scholarship Reference”

Copy of CV

Research Proposal

Applicants are required to provide research proposal of not more than 1000 words. It should include:

a straightforward, descriptive, and informative title

the question that your research will address

a justification of why this question is important and worth investigating

an assessment of how your own research will engage with recent research on the subject

a brief account of the methodology and data sources you will use

References to sources cited in the proposal and an indicative wider bibliography (The references and bibliography are in addition to the 1000 words).

Why are adolescents that live in areas with high concentrations of tobacco shops more likely to smoke?

New findings suggest Scottish teenagers living in areas with a high density of shops selling tobacco have greater knowledge about cigarette brands.

Earlier work in Scotland found that adults and adolescents living in areas with high densities of shops selling tobacco were more likely to smoke. Public health researchers have suggested that restrictions on tobacco retail outlet density are a potential ‘new frontier’ in the long-running campaign to achieve a tobacco ‘endgame’. However, the reasons why exposure to greater numbers of tobacco outlets is associated with smoking are unclear and the types of restrictions on retail density that might best support this public health goal are not known.

A new study by CRESH has explored possible pathways linking tobacco outlet density to smoking among adolescents. Our work used responses from 22,049 13 and 15 year olds to the 2010 Scottish School Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey. Data from the Scottish Tobacco Retailers Register were used to calculate a measure of the density of tobacco outlets around the survey respondents’ homes.

We were interested to know whether adolescents in areas with more tobacco outlets had better knowledge of tobacco products, and so assessed how many cigarette brands they could name. We also looked at whether adolescents in high outlet density areas had more positive attitudes about smoking as it has been suggested that exposure to outlets and the tobacco marketing and purchasing found within them may ‘normalise’ smoking. We examined whether in areas where there are more tobacco outlets it may be easier for adolescents to make underage cigarette purchases. Finally, we considered tobacco price, assessing whether in areas with more tobacco shops, and more retail competition, cigarettes were cheaper. Continue reading TOBACCO OUTLET DENSITY AND PATHWAYS TO SMOKING AMONG TEENAGERS→